"For far too long, the very reasonable questions raised by 9/11 have been ignored and even ridiculed by America's press and politicians, who treat the subject with the sort of willful blindness that suggests a wish not to find out unpleasant truths. We, the people, therefore owe the editors of this important new collection our warm thanks for their intelligent and unrelenting work." -- Mark Crispin Miller, professor of culture and communications, New York University, and author of Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One, Too (Unless We Stop Them)

Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world’s strongest and most technologically sophisticated country?

Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend imperial control at home and abroad.

David Ray Griffin is professor of philosophy of religion and theology, emeritus, at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, where he remains a co-director of the Center for Process Studies. His 30 books include The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004) and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005).

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. A poet, he was a winner in 2002 of the Lannan Poetry Award.

Olive Branch Press

Media Reviews

"This is the most important book of our time. Distinguished national and international scientists and scholars present massive evidence that the 9/11 Commission Report is a hoax and that the 9/11 "terrorist attack" has been manipulated to serve a hegemonic agenda in the Middle East. The book's call for a truly independent panel of experts to be empowered to bring out the true facts must be heeded or Americans will never again live under accountable government." — Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the US Treasury

"Read this. Read this now. And then tell someone else what it told you. If you wondered where morality, intellectual rigor, common sense and historical perspective went when they disappeared from public discourse, be reassured—the authors of these essays were keeping them safe for you, along with a surprisingly functional sense of humor. This is a massively important book about events which are still changing our world—forget the internet wingnuts, forget the blurry thinking and the blurry photographs, forget the government gibberish—if you want to know about 9/11 read this book. Read it. Read it now. And then tell someone else what it told you." — A. L. Kennedy, Paradise and Indelible Acts

"Official versions of historical events should always be questioned. This book, dealing with 9/11 and much more, does just that, and from various points of view. It will provoke argument and that's a good thing." — Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

"In 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott point out that the book's publication 'signals the beginning of a new phase of the 9/11 Truth Movement, one in which scholars will play an increasingly larger role.' Griffin and Scott have assembled academics, scientists, engineers, and intellectuals with fine minds and courageous hearts to deliver the bitter pill—the official explanation of the events of 9/11 is false and the evidence indicating an inside job is significant. In doing so, they have returned scholarship to its rightful place of leading us back to excellence." — Catherine Austin Fitts, assistant secretary for housing, first Bush administration

"It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with compelling evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole 'war on terror' was based on a prior deception. This book hence confronts the American people—indeed the people of the world as a whole—with an issue second to none in importance and urgency. I give this book, which in no way can be dismissed as the ravings of 'paranoid conspiracy theorists,' my highest possible recommendation." — Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity)

"All Americans who love their country enough to dig into the facts of these critical times will be well rewarded by examining David Griffin's books. 9/11 truth is a very important issue-with the power to bring lasting change to our country." — The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., former pastor of Riverside Church, New York